The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for producing and assembling articles made of molded plastic parts. The invention is particularly useful for producing and assembling a three-part spray nozzle, such as the one described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,958,760, and is therefore described below with respect to such application; but it will be appreciated that such an article is described purely for purposes of example and that the invention could be used for producing and assembling other articles having a smaller or greater number of parts.
The conventional procedure for producing articles made of a number of plastic parts is to form the individual parts (e.g. by injection molding) and then to assemble the parts together. This involves many handling operations since the parts are individually handled and then assembled together. Such a procedure is tedious, expensive and time-consuming particularly when the parts are very small. Moreover, this conventional procedure requires very close manufacturing tolerances which can greatly add to the manufacturing costs, since the parts of any one mold or batch must be freely interchangeable with the parts of other molds or batches to enable proper assembling of the complete article.
An object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus for producing articles constituted of a plurality of plastic parts, which method and apparatus have advantages in the above respects.